Graves Full of Sunshine
by PapaChaos
Summary: The legacy he could not accomplish, the people he could not save and the graves he could not fill. A retelling of the Mortal Kombat cannon from the vantage point of the man in the shadow of a Champion. Compliant fic to "Damnation". Gore, violence, the usual.
1. 1976

A/N: I'll be finishing The Sue Rules soon so I decided to already get cracking on the next project. There are several others that are to follow and I really need to churn them out before they become lost in the recesses of my mind.

This is a sort of companion piece to "Damnation", basically for the sake of exploring character backgrounds and plugging in some of the intricacies of the organisations, alliances blah blah blah in the cannon. In simpler words, its a re-imagining of the MK cannon and if that doesn't make you hate the story already, then I don't know what will.

Disclaimer: Don't own Mortal Kombat – that will be quite apparent throughout this fic.

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**Graves Full of Sunshine  
**

**by Mr. Havik**

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Prologue

"Hey," the man coos as he moves toward the loveseat and settles down. Clad in a suit, clean, shaven and with a warm smile playing across his lips, he looks nothing less than a gentleman and yet the young couple is wary of him. The mother's gaze darts between him and the toddler who lies on his belly on the centre-rug, his small pudgy hands flying across the sheets of paper strewn all about, scribbling messy shapes that to him look like a work of art. "Can you tell me your name?"

"Kevin," the boy answers, lifting his chin to regard the stranger beaming back at him before returning to his crude drawing; a crooked house and a deformed stick-figure sipping from a giant carton of Milo. His favourite. Besides, that is all he knows how to draw other than the obligatory triangular mountains in the background with the sun peeking from the valleys.

"And what's your mother's name?" he asks but this time the child does not meet his gaze. He had acknowledged his existence when he first looked up at the unfamiliar face and he does not need to do it again. He feels his mother moving behind him and the soft whisper of air squeezing out from the armchair lets him know that she has settled down as well. The father is still standing by the kitchen's entrance – he imagines him with arms folded across his chest and a frown on his face.

"Mum," he says, plucking out a red marker from a box and scrawling the loopy petals he needs to make the oversized flower. It is the only blossom in the flat, grassy yard. The stranger chuckles. Kevin is aware that the laughter is not to mock him, otherwise he would have promptly dropped all his pencils and crayons and markers, and ran crying into his mother's arms. It exudes warmth rather than poison.

"Does everyone call her mum?"

"No... I don't think so..."

"Do you know that she has another name?"

"No."

"It's Fan."

The woman clears her throat but her son does not notice.

"No, her name is Mum," he locks eyes with the stranger a second time, but only out of disbelief – he is too young to understand the subtler courtesies. He does not understand why the man talks nonsense. Why would his mother be named something ridiculous as "Fan"? The absurdity of it all quickly translated into hilarity and the boy giggled. "Mum is not a fan...!"

"That's her name," he shrugs and the toddler decides he likes him. He likes him enough that he heaves himself off his belly and sits upright, his colourful tools and the doodles he created lying alone on the rug. "But it's not what you think it is. In my country, Fan means "Earth"."

"But why don't you call it "Earth"?" Kevin demands, curious yet still entertained. "That's silly."

"Everything's silly back at my home," the stranger waves his hands and the child's gaze follows. "Do you want to know what you're name is back at my home?"

He shakes his head and giggles again, hoping for something even funnier than before.

"Kung Lao."


	2. Entries 1 to 4

A/N: Hi. Did you know that updates are meant to follow a steady pace ? Did you also know that the author of this and a couple of other fan fics is going to be consistently inconsistent with said updates because he needs to graduate with a good CGPA? NOW YOU KNOW.

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Why am I writing this?

If I have to be completely honest with myself, I don't have the slightest idea. I'm not doing this so there's something for my friends to remember me by. I don't intend to pass this off as a chapter in the annals of my family's history and neither am I doing this to preserve the truth about the survival of this world and the worlds beyond.

I'm not writing this out of obligation, but because I want to. _Why_ I want to, that's a question I don't have an answer for. Maybe I'll find my reason, while I'm still not even halfway through or perhaps just right at the end. Or perhaps I'll never find it at all. But for now, I feel like doing this.

I'm this journal's author and it's pretty likely that I'll be its only reader. Can't imagine leaving these dumb thoughts and useless memories for someone – I mean, what can anyone gain by knowing what my favourite colour is or who my favourite actress is (yellow and Goldie Hawn, by the way)? And it's not movie material either, although my life has had its fair share of explosions and ninja fights, but who the hell takes that seriously? Johnny's entire film career can attest to that.

Getting back to the point, like I said, this journal is for me alone and the reason I'm giving myself is that I don't want to forget the life I've experienced. It's not every day that I think back to my first day of school, my first date or the moment I realised when I stood at a crossroads. When I'm walking down the street or watching T.V. I'm living in the now. I don't think about what's gone or what's about to come unless I will myself to do it. And when I finally will myself, I write in this journal every memory, every sentiment I've ever had about anything.

Now I'm asking myself: why don't I want to forget? Aren't some things worth forgetting? Don't I have regrets? I know I'm not making sense here (and I probably won't be any better off decoding this tripe when I read it again sometime later) so I'm just going to get to the point.

I'm going to die.

And I don't mean like _inevitably_ die like everything that's ever been alive, but soon. Like a-couple-of-years soon. Probably. Maybe. I'm not really sure because, clinically, I'm as fit as a horse. Mom once told me that it's in the family; that we never grow old. In any other situation that may have sounded like she was boasting about our forever-young spirit, but she said that while she was hooked up to machines, fighting against a cancer that didn't let her live long enough to celebrate her 40th birthday.

Losing my train of thought – anyway, I have to be perfectly blunt about this because it's something that I need to accept but haven't already. And to do that, I'm recording my life onto these pages. I obviously can't perfectly replicate everything about everything that I've ever experienced because there are some things in this world that can't be put into words. Also, my memory isn't faultless, so there's that. But I'm going to try to the best of my abilities.

If I have to give myself a reason for doing this, it has to be so that I can come to terms with the fact that I won't be alive in the near future. I'm going to miss a lot of things, like Johnny's future exploding-ninja movies, so why don't I take what I've already gained and live with that?

It's not perfect, but this is going to be my reason until I'm absolutely sure.

* * *

It feels like it'd be fatal if I start off by dabbling a little in my personal philosophies because, let's be honest, I'm kind of a hypocrite. But then I also feel like it'll be a lot harder to find a place to fit them in later, so why not from the get go?

Life is not coincidental. Call it fate, call it natural selection; whatever it is, I don't believe that life happens on a whim. The circumstances that lead to life's conception, creation and eventual fulfilment, no matter how ordinary they may seem, are nothing short of miracles. I'm mainly Chinese but have hints of Spanish and Japanese blood from my father's side and am a quarter Nepalese because of my mother's lineage.

So this is what I ask myself: how and why did these people – from different corners of the world and with no possible idea that the other even existed in the first place – meet and decide to start a family together? And then, why did that one sperm get to the egg first and make the child that would grow up, meet another total stranger from a far-off land and get caught up in that same process all over again? It's implausible to think that all of them just happened upon each other and passed on a legacy that would wind up to the latest instalment: me.

Call it fate, call it natural selection; whatever it is, life certainly doesn't happen by coincidence. But this was something that I didn't realise until ten years ago. For the most part, I guess I was leading a blissfully ignorant existence until the one "coincidence" that would lead me down a radically different path – though that stuff's for later.

For reference, here's a portion of a letter from my father, Joseph Qiao Peng, on how he met Mom (translated from Mandarin to English by me, meaning it's not as good a translation as I would've liked):

"_India offered nothing other than a contract and I suspected that I would have to spend a pitiful summer sweating under the sun with bad food on my table. Upon arrival, I began doubting if the money was worth it and would have immediately fled for London had it not been for my lovely translator. Before you assume things, I called the translator "lovely" because through her I was able to stumble upon her colleague, Fan Lijuan Yao._

_You know her as "mother"._

_I had to make a few trips to the translator's office during the course of my stay and, with the time I had, managed to convince her to a Sunday brunch. It was during our little outing that I realised that we were an utterly mismatched pair. She scowled at my jokes, complained about the food and made it painfully clear that my tie utterly disgusted her. Never before, in all my years, had I ever met a woman who so vehemently opposed everything I stood for that not a strand of commonality stood between us._

_The brunch itself was disastrous in ways unimaginable and I went back to my hotel room with a single, mad thought on my mind: she was the one."_

The whole thing sounds like it was lifted from a cutesy, romance novel. An architect and a translator-turned-housewife. A pair of ordinary people leading fairly ordinary lives. Then why was this unassuming little couple's son burdened with the duty to punch inter-dimensional bad guys back to where they came from? It sounds crazy when I think about it, but it's true that for the longest time I never asked myself this question, always chalking it up to coincidence, that it could always have been someone else.

But things as they unravelled eventually left me no choice but to face the fact that my life was meant to be this way. It had been since the moment the first seed of my lineage was born – generations upon generations of strangers coming together, creating life and letting it flow, continue across the times until it all arrived here.

I existed because my father fell in love with his translator's colleague, and my parents exist because their parents had "chanced" upon each other and so on. There were infinite possibilities, so many things that could have gone in another direction, so many things that could have turned out differently and yet everything converged, took a single path and led itself to some guy who can toss a hat real good.

Kind of like 'The Garden of Forking Paths', but not as eloquently put.

* * *

I was born Kevin Peng on the 9th of August, 1972 in a clinic in Sheffield, as per my birth certificate. There's not much I remember from the earliest years of my childhood and the little that I do is pretty stupid, stuff like getting spooked by T.V. static and arguing with Mom over a "2" candle for my birthday (we had these candles shaped as numbers and my favourite number was "2"; Mom tried to convince me that because I was turning four, I should be getting a "4" candle).

Speaking of "4", I don't recall Uncle Wei much from before I was that age. In most of the childhood memories I have of him, he's dressed real snappy, tux and everything, and he's grinning like he's here to charm the ladies. At that age, things about race or ethnicity didn't exactly settle all too well in my mind – as far as I was concerned, my world was my house and the school I went to. Places like the general store Mom shopped from and the neighbour's house were alien lands filled with alien people that were either damn cool or damn scary. So when he told me of a "country" called "China", where my Mom and Dad were born and raised, I was both lost and entertained. I didn't have an inkling of what Uncle Wei was talking about but whatever came out of his mouth had me spellbound.

Mom and Dad to me were just "Mom" and "Dad". Those were their names, but Uncle said they had more. He was either a liar or the most intelligent human being I had ever come across – I picked up on the latter. This man was full of so much mystery, so much intrigue, and his knowledge was apparently limitless. He knew of things even I didn't know about: how old my parents were, what were the numbers that came after "2" (again, don't really understand that obsession) and what my "other" name was.

The last part caught me because "Kung Lao" was the most horribly uncool name anyone could ever give me. Of course I didn't know that it roughly meant "old man" back then, but I didn't have to be fluent in the language to know that it sounded ridiculously dumb. Little did I know, this was only the first of the many, countless times Uncle Wei would consistently disappoint me, but at least for my earlier years, those disappointments weren't nearly as soul-crushing.

Only as recently did Uncle casually insert himself into my life that he suddenly decided it was the perfect time for a family trip to the Far East because he could get us discounts on a holiday package (he was a travel agent). Mom was _not_ happy.

Mom was always uptight about everything. She'd always find something to pick on, from the way someone was dressed to the way they talked or what they talked about and was suspicious of people, even Dad and Uncle. But the worst was her anger, a trait that I was in many ways quite unfortunate to adopt, a little less unfortunate in others. When Mom got angry, the angels would cower in fear. There was not a being alive that could match her fury and none that dared stand in her path when her wrath was upon all.

I guess that's why Dad was perfect for her. If Mom was the angriest person I knew, then Dad was the chillest. He was always in the background, making a single bad pun whenever the opportunity presented itself and then quietly melting back into obscurity. Whenever Mom scolded me, all Dad had to do was say "Come on, Li, he's (insert excuse)", effectively redirecting the storm over to his side so I could slip out without a scratch. And he'd just quietly take it until Mom would eventually run out of fuel, and the whole thing would just end there.

Imagine a hippie and a cop living a married life and you're good to go. And with Uncle Wei in the picture, we could've had our own family sitcom. Mom, the dictatorial warden; Dad, the lazy pacifist and Uncle would be the gay one. Well, he wasn't exactly gay. He was more of a dandy; tearing up during emotional movie scenes, making goo-goo faces at animals and babies. On the other hand though, he was a ridiculously gifted speaker and could move even the hardest hearts, probably why he had a job as a travel agent in the first place. While Mom was completely against the whole thing, Uncle – with his god-gifted silver tongue – managed to convince her in the end.

* * *

I hated Shanghai the moment I first set foot on it. It was noisy, grimy and packed with clutter – not that Sheffield was any different but Shanghai turned everything up to eleven. My taste buds didn't adjust themselves to the blandness of the food, and I ate too much of it because nothing was ever filling. It was no surprise I quickly wound up with a bad stomach, so we had to cut the vacation short. Mom wasn't too happy about the whole thing anyway and a constantly wailing toddler did little to brighten up her mood. We were on the plane within the week.

Uncle visited us again a couple of months after but only stayed for lunch. He showered me with candy, exchanged bad jokes with Dad and made Mom snap at him before he was gone for the rest of the year.

We went to China again in the spring of '77 with him, even though Mom protested till the last minute. This time, however, our stop was Beijing. The differences between Beijing and Shanghai were subtle – not that it mattered to a five year old, but at least I gave Mom less trouble than I did last time. I was getting curious, naturally, and being able to jump from one end of the world to the other turned into an adventure the more I started to look at it that way.

We got to travel a little by road and made a quick visit south, to the Henan Province, stopping by at the _Baima Si_ and the Iron Pagoda (which I began calling terrible things when I had gotten much older) all in one day before making it to our hotel. Next morning we went to the Shoalin Temple on Mount Song and I pestered my parents and Uncle if they'd take me to see some Kung Fu (Dad and I were huge fans of Bruce Lee).

"Did Bruce Lee come here?!"

"I want to see ninjas!"

"Have you killed someone before?!"

Those were the kind of questions I asked when the abbot came to greet us and I was lucky that he didn't understand English all that well. The Bruce Lee comment went unnoticed as well because he obviously had no idea what a television was, but that didn't stifle my parents' embarrassment. While Dad took the initiative to translate my words for the monk's convenience – minus a few politically incorrect terms – Uncle urged me to introduce myself.

The language barrier made the conversation awkward. It wasn't that I didn't know the dialect but rather I was more comfortable with English, so I didn't bother speaking in a tongue that the abbot would understand. Besides, the only response I got out of that man was a nod and a smile and I could guess that that was what he always did when he had no idea what was going on.

My parents weren't deeply religious folks either. They had no reason to linger on any longer than they already had so they said their goodbyes and went down the steps of the entrance, Mom carrying me in her arms. I chanced a look back at the old monk and found that Uncle Wei had stayed behind with him.

Every time I recall that image of Uncle and the abbot standing under the shade of a tree, I see these silhouettes with vaguely human faces that seem to be melting in the heat. Their frowns, however, are stuck where they are and the lids have slipped down to reveal their eyes. All they do is silently stare at me, unmoving. I chalk it up to my overactive imagination. The tree with its branches swaying in the wind had cast shadows on the two, making them look so frightening that I instantly burst into tears.

Come to think of it, why had I seen something like that? It wasn't as if I was hallucinating. I had read somewhere that memories of bad childhood experiences often become muddled with nightmarish imagery. But then what was so traumatic about the whole thing that now, every time I think back to that moment, I see distorted silhouette-like beings instead of my uncle and the monk? What had scared me so much that I had unconsciously turned the memory into something out of an eldritch nightmare?

For as long as I've lived up until now, I still don't know.


End file.
